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Q: When starting up, how are you able to recruit and hire
talent with little or no money?
James Foo
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

In our experience at my VC firm Forerunner, we believe there
are three key ingredients to attracting top talent to your
organization.

1. Have a clear vision. The clearer you are
about the company aspirations the easier it will be to draw
appropriate and qualified people to your company. Identify a
mission statement early on. Be specific about the opportunity you
are addressing, how you plan to win and what the company will
stand for. Obviously the more compelling these attributes are,
the easier it will be to gain the confidence of top tier
teammates. This kind of upfront effort stands to help you get the
right conversations going as you start to interview (entice)
people.

2. Adopt a disciplined approach. Having a
disciplined approach to team building, as with most all other
aspects of bringing a product to market and scaling, is critical.
As a founder it is an advantage to be clear about the resources
and skills you need from teammates to meet short-term goals.

One suggestion is to develop an organizational chart that maps to
your year one and year two goals specifically. Think critically
about what types of leaders you need in each spot to address the
core objectives by department. From there it typically makes
sense to rank the order of importance (assuming resources are
lean) and prioritize securing talent to address those areas
first. Having essential skills on board to manage the most
important aspects of launching your company stands to instill
greater comfort for your team, while setting you up for success.

3. Inspiring enthusiasm and confidence. The best
ideas are only just ideas until you are able to build and empower
a team to execute against those goals. For you mission, bringing
authenticity to the table and passion for the pursuit is
meaningful. In general, people want to be part of something that
matters -- they want to feel connected to a mission and a
purpose. The most ambitious people want to have leaders they can
look up. Be that person. Respect others, be fair, listen to
feedback, be inspirational and confident.

None of the above has to do with money. In fact, money will
likely follow all of these attributes as well.

Having secured funding does help provide comfort to team members
that are more sensitive to financial risks, in particular. It is
possible, probably likely, that many of the people you identify
in the above process will not be in a position to leave their
current employment in favor of your venture until you do secure
financial support. That's okay, you can have key people
identified and let investors know that they plan to formally join
the team once proper funding is secured.